Atoms for
Peace

LEONARD WEISS /
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists v.59, n.6, 1nov03

Did the 50-year-old Atoms for Peace program accelerate nuclear weapons
proliferation? The jury has been in for some time on this question, and the
answer is yes.

The character of the Atoms for Peace program and the political decisions that
shaped it have been the subject of numerous books and scholarly papers. But many
popular narratives of the program begin with Dwight Eisenhower’s famous
December 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech at the United Nations, giving the
impression that the program as we know it and its consequences were the logical
result of the proposals contained in the speech. This ignores the political
context of the speech, as well as the history of earlier thought on peaceful
nuclear activities following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Not only did the execution of the Atoms for Peace program essentially ignore
the basic idea in Eisenhower’s speech, but the program also went down a path
that experts had predicted would lead to proliferation. Understanding the
historical background of the speech is vital to explaining why.

Truman’s message to Congress

In 1945, in the aftermath of the first wartime use of nuclear weapons,
discussions about the future of nuclear weapons intensified within the U.S.
government. Secretary of War Henry Stimson believed that the post-war
relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union depended largely on
how the United States handled the question of the bomb. At a cabinet meeting,
Stimson advocated sharing information about the peaceful uses of nuclear energy
with the Soviets, on the grounds that the basic knowledge needed to make the
bomb would not remain secret for long. Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson
supported Stimson’s idea; Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal opposed it.

In a post-meeting memo to President Harry Truman, Acheson argued that joint
development of the bomb by the United States, Britain, and Canada would appear
to the Soviets as “unanswerable evidence of an Anglo-American combination
against them” and that they would act vigorously to restore the power
imbalance—especially if the United States tried to maintain “a policy of
exclusion.” [1] Elements of this debate were reflected in an October 3, 1945
message from Truman to Congress that put in motion ideas that ultimately led to
the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (the McMahon Act).

Truman’s notable message contains the first official presidential reference
to peaceful use of nuclear energy and its future control. In a prescient preview
of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which would not come into being
for another 25 years, he said: “The hope of civilization lies in international
arrangements looking, if possible, to the renunciation of the use and
development of the atomic bomb, and directing and encouraging the use of atomic
energy and all future scientific information toward peaceful and humanitarian
ends.”

Truman then proposed initiating “discussions with Great Britain and Canada,
and then with other nations [including, presumably, the Soviet Union], in an
effort to effect agreement on the conditions under which cooperation might
replace rivalry in the field of atomic power.” He emphasized that the
discussions would not involve weapons manufacturing information, but rather “the
terms under which international collaboration and exchange of scientific
information might safely proceed.”

Truman also proposed creating a U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to direct
nuclear research and to establish control over the basic materials essential to
the development of nuclear energy, peaceful or otherwise. The AEC was “to
interfere as little as possible with private research and private enterprise.”

Truman’s message came at a time when the United States had a monopoly on
nuclear weapons as well as a head start on nuclear development. His subsequent
meetings with the prime ministers of Britain and Canada resulted in the Agreed
Declaration of November 15, 1945, which called for international control of
nuclear energy; the signers believed that neither countermeasures nor secrecy
provided adequate defense from the bomb’s revolutionary destructiveness.
Truman was prepared to negotiate with the Soviets as well, but Secretary of
State James Byrnes did not favor dealing directly with the Soviets and latched
onto a proposal by Vannevar Bush, one of the organizers of the bomb effort, to
have the United Nations be the forum in which the future of the bomb would be
debated. At a meeting in Moscow, the Soviets agreed to help create a U.N.
commission on atomic energy.

The Acheson-Lilienthal report

To craft U.S. policy proposals for submission to the U.N. commission, Byrnes
asked Acheson to chair a committee, which consisted of Bush, James Conant, John
McCloy, and Leslie Groves. Acheson appointed a board of consultants to work out
the details of the proposals. The board was chaired by David Lilienthal, former
head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and included Robert Oppenheimer, former
scientific director of the Manhattan Project.

After six weeks of intensive work, on March 16, 1946, the board presented the
committee with a 57-page policy report on the international control of atomic
energy. What has come to be known as the Acheson-Lilienthal report contained
some startling conclusions about nuclear development and the risk of nuclear
proliferation. The board determined that the pursuit of atomic energy and the
pursuit of atomic bombs were in large part interchangeable and interdependent,
and that because of global rivalries, an international inspections regime based
on good faith was doomed to fail.

“We have concluded unanimously that there is no prospect of security
against atomic warfare in a system of international agreements to outlaw such
weapons controlled only by a system which relies on inspection and similar
police-like methods,” wrote the board. “National rivalries in the
development of atomic energy readily convertible to destructive purposes are the
heart of the difficulty. . . . A system of inspection superimposed on an
otherwise uncontrolled exploitation of atomic energy by national governments
will not be an adequate safeguard.” [2] Despite this, the report endorsed
international cooperation instead of an outright ban on nuclear weapons.

The Baruch plan

On the day the report was presented to Byrnes, Acheson learned that Truman
had asked Wall Street speculator and large campaign contributor Bernard Baruch
to sell the report to the rest of the world. Baruch, who had a famously
monumental ego, decided to make significant changes and promote the plan as his
own. In particular, Baruch scuttled the notion of international ownership of the
means of production of nuclear materials because it was not in keeping with the
American free enterprise system. He also added two provisions that proved fatal:
one on veto-proof sanctions (“swift and sure penalties”) for violations, and
another declaring that America would not relinquish its atomic bombs (which, in
June 1946, numbered nine) until firm guarantees were in place that no other
nation could arm itself nuclearly. Moreover, the United States would be allowed
to continue to manufacture nuclear weapons until the negotiated guarantees were
in place and effective. When asked by Truman what sanctions he had in mind,
Baruch said he meant “war.” [3]

Truman was hesitant to accept the changes to the Acheson-Lilienthal plan but
acquiesced after Baruch threatened to quit.

On June 14, 1946, at the opening session of the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission
at Hunter College in the Bronx, Baruch set forth his version of the plan with
the famous opening words, “We are here to make a choice between the quick and
the dead.” What was “dead” at that point were the prospects for acceptance
by the Soviets.

The Soviets countered with their own proposal, which would have outlawed the
use and production of nuclear weapons and called for the destruction of all
existing nuclear weapons. As the Cold War intensified, the Soviets further
proposed that the atomic question be dealt with only within the framework of
general disarmament negotiations.

Baruch didn’t want to negotiate and forced a vote at the end of the year.
Unsurprisingly, the Baruch plan was approved by the U.N. Atomic Energy
Commission, with only the Soviet Union and Poland abstaining. But it was then
killed by a Soviet veto in the Security Council.

Truman later confessed to Acheson that choosing Baruch “was the worst
mistake I ever made.” Acheson described Baruch’s performance pithily: “It
was his ball and he balled it up.” [4]

That ended the possibility of any U.S-Soviet cooperation on nuclear matters
at that point. There was little likelihood of an alternate outcome.

About a month after Baruch presented his plan, Congress enacted the McMahon
Act, which created the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the Joint Committee on
Atomic Energy (JCAE) and made secrecy and the non-sharing of nuclear information
official U.S. policy.

Everything concerning atomic energy, from uranium ore to nuclear fuel, was to
come under the authority of, and remain the property of, the AEC. Secrecy was to
be maintained and the death penalty prescribed for passing secrets to a foreign
power. The law was crafted to keep the U.S. nuclear monopoly intact and to give
the United States an edge in the development of nuclear technology by denying it
to others. By giving the JCAE the power of authorization and by shielding its
deliberations from public view, the law essentially put the entire nuclear
enterprise into the hands of one congressional committee and the five AEC
commissioners, who also met behind closed doors. Supporters of an open
private-sector role in nuclear development were not happy with the new law,
which was characterized by Connecticut Republican Cong. Clare Booth Luce as
something that “might have been written by the most ardent Soviet commissar.”
[5]

Toward the industrial atom

David Lilienthal was named the first chairman of the AEC. Although the AEC’s
priority was making weapons, Lilienthal appointed an Industrial Advisory Group,
and the AEC began a nuclear power research program.

Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Argonne Laboratories started work on test
reactors, focusing both on nuclear weapons and power. In 1947 Congress
authorized work on a nuclear submarine and a nuclear-powered airplane. (The
latter literally never got off the ground. The project died after it was
suggested that the weight of shielding would be prohibitive and that the problem
might be solved by using only pilots who would die of old age before they
succumbed to radiation poisoning.)

At Oak Ridge, a pressurized-water reactor designed by Alvin Weinberg and
Eugene Wigner, using ordinary water as a moderator and a coolant, was developed
to power the first nuclear submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus. This and the
later-developed boiling-water reactor contained the basic engineering ideas upon
which the U.S. nuclear power program was built. Serious political issues
surrounded the start of the program.

Industrial America’s dislike of the AEC monopoly on the development of
nuclear technology became increasingly profound as hype expanded in the print
media about the future glories of nuclear power. (Autos would run for a year on
a vitamin-sized nuclear pellet; electricity would be too cheap to meter.)
Government control was raised as an issue in the 1948 presidential campaign by
Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey; after Dewey lost, the Industrial Advisory
Group of the AEC took up the issue and recommended that the government share
nuclear information with the private sector. Lilienthal agreed, and Congress
relaxed some of the McMahon Act’s stringent secrecy rules.

The companies involved in the weapons program, including Westinghouse, GE,
Monsanto, and Union Carbide, were anxious to transform their technical nuclear
experience into commercial enterprise. Their champion was Lewis Strauss, who,
after taking the reins of the AEC a few months after Eisenhower’s inauguration
in 1953, brokered a joint project between Westinghouse and Duquesne Lighting to
build a small power reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. The application for
the plant was filed with the AEC in July 1953.

At the same time, other nuclear nations were developing their own plans for
power plants. The Soviets were on the verge of operating the first civilian
nuclear energy station, and the British were building a 100-megawatt plant they
thought could be the prototype for a commercial station.

Concern was rising in the Eisenhower administration and in Congress that the
United States was lagging behind in the race to demonstrate the first commercial
nuclear plant and to take the lead in marketing nuclear energy. But national
security was Eisenhower’s highest priority at that point, and he was more
worried about the nuclear arms race than about nuclear power.

A report prepared during the last year of the Truman administration would
play a pivotal role in Eisenhower’s decisions on the atom.

Operation Candor

The U.S. nuclear weapons monopoly had ended and an arms race had begun on
August 29, 1949, when the Soviets successfully tested their own fission weapon.
The Defense Department and the JCAE proposed major expansions of
fissionable-material production facilities. Truman discussed these ideas at the
White House in January 1952 with Dean Acheson (now secretary of state), Gordon
Dean (chairman of the AEC), and Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett. When Dean
questioned whether the size of the expansion was justified, Lovett replied that
excess fissionable materials or components produced that were not needed for
weapons could be used for peaceful purposes. Truman asked Dean if it was true
“that the nuclear components could be converted to civilian use.” [6] Dean
said it was true, marking perhaps the first recorded instance of a U.S.
president discussing the possibility of converting nuclear weapons material to
peaceful uses.

As the U.S. and Soviet nuclear stockpiles began to grow rapidly, so too did
concerns about the possibility that the Soviets could deliver a “knockout blow”
to the United States—a nuclear strike that would wipe out the U.S. industrial
base and retaliation capabilities. In April 1952, Acheson established an
advisory committee headed by Robert Oppenheimer to look for new approaches to
nuclear disarmament or control. The Oppenheimer Panel filed its report on
January 15, 1953, shortly before Eisenhower was inaugurated as president.

The report concluded that the large increases in production of fissile
material had made it virtually impossible to verify any nuclear disarmament
agreement because of uncertainty in accounting for all the material that had
been produced.

Seeing no immediate avenue to verifiable nuclear disarmament, the Oppenheimer
committee warned that there was significant danger of a Soviet knockout-blow
capability within a few years, and that until the United States had sufficiently
robust defensive and offensive capabilities, the danger would persist. But the
committee also felt that efforts to end the arms race were important and that
the public would support those efforts if people were told of the dangers they
faced.

The committee issued three main recommendations: to publicly discuss the
coming crisis; to release information on the U.S. arsenal and weapons production
in order to inform the public and to dissuade the Soviets from thinking that
they might already have a knockout-blow capability; and to begin negotiations
with the Soviets on arms control measures to limit stockpiles and delivery
vehicles.

White House Assistant for International Affairs C. D. Jackson, whose main job
was as Eisenhower’s speechwriter and purveyor of ideas on scoring propaganda
points against the Soviet bloc, was asked to produce a presidential address on
the panel’s ideas, which Jackson dubbed Operation Candor. Working with the
State Department, Jackson had completed a few drafts when the first Soviet test
of a thermonuclear weapon was announced on August 12, 1953, just nine months
after the first U.S. test.

This galvanized opponents of Operation Candor, who ultimately included
members of Eisenhower’s cabinet and Lewis Strauss, who had recently become
chairman of the AEC. They feared that a candid description of the danger faced
by the American people from nuclear weapons would increase anxiety without
providing a solution. There was also opposition from the Joint Chiefs, who were
concerned that any discussions of arms limitation might be an impediment to
their push for a larger military budget based on the so-called “New Look”
that involved greater reliance by the military on nuclear weapons.

Even Eisenhower found Jackson’s early drafts, rife with visions of global
nuclear destruction, empty of the notion of “hope.” [7] Aware of the power
of public opinion, Eisenhower wanted something that would calm the growing
nuclear fears in the wake of the Soviet thermonuclear test.

The uranium bank

The following month, in a deft move that avoided political pitfalls,
Eisenhower had the idea of a “uranium bank.” Both the Soviet Union and the
United States would set aside, for peaceful purposes, agreed amounts of fissile
materials from their weapon stockpiles. The bank would be administered by a new
international entity, the “Atomic Energy Agency.” At the time, people
thought that the amount of uranium worldwide was extremely limited, and
Eisenhower believed a bank could decrease the threat of nuclear war by reducing
weapon stockpiles—that there was, in essence, a zero-sum game between uranium
for peaceful purposes and for weapons.

In his diary, Eisenhower wrote: “The United States could unquestionably
afford to reduce its atomic stockpile by two or three times the amounts that the
Russians might contribute . . . and still improve our relative position in the
Cold War and even in the event of the outbreak of war.” [8] He suggested to
Strauss that they come up with an amount of material to be turned over to the
bank that the United States could readily remove from its stockpile “but which
would be difficult for the Soviets to match.” [9] No such figure was ever
proposed, mainly because there was no reliable intelligence on Soviet production—and
it became increasingly clear that there was much more uranium in the world than
originally thought.

Eisenhower’s bank proposal of September 1953 was worked on over the next
three months by a group of advisers that included Jackson, Strauss, and
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Eisenhower’s notion of an Atomic Energy
Agency lacked details as to exactly how a uranium bank program would be carried
out. Such an agency, Eisenhower believed, would devise methods to allocate
contributed uranium for peaceful purposes like agriculture, medicine, and
especially “to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas
of the world.” It did not preclude a role for the private sector, but seemed
to suggest that this agency would control the pace and direction of peaceful
nuclear activities carried out in a substantial part of the world. This was
definitely not the vision of the nuclear industry.

The speech

The bank idea was the genesis of Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech. At
its core, the speech was an arms control proposal that had the twin virtues of
not requiring inspections of the Soviets and of being a great propaganda
initiative that showed the U.S. desire for the peaceful atom. If the Soviets
rejected the idea, it would have presumably labeled them as uninterested in
nuclear arms control. But the Soviets applauded Eisenhower’s speech, and
adroitly and indirectly rejected his plan by putting their own spin on it,
pointing out that Eisenhower did not propose to outlaw nuclear weapons, as they
had.

That Eisenhower’s proposal was intended as an arms control measure is
supported by an entry in his diary made two days after the speech, in which he
wrote that the underlying reason for the speech was “the clear conviction that
the world was racing toward catastrophe” and that something had to be done to
put a brake on this movement. [10]

There is no question that Eisenhower’s proposal presented an intrinsically
attractive vision in a world worried about atoms for war. But the global
outpouring of support for Atoms for Peace following the speech was at least
partially due to an extensive and effective public relations campaign organized
by Jackson. U.S. businesses sent out hundreds of thousands of pamphlets of the
speech, printed in 10 languages. U.S. and foreign media were inundated with
information and advertising; the U.S. Information Agency and Voice of America
gave their highest level of coverage to the speech.

The PR campaign was so successful that it eclipsed the fact that the speech
included a long qualitative and semi-quantitative description of the power of
the U.S. nuclear arsenal: “Today, the United States’ stockpile of atomic
weapons, which, of course, increases daily, exceeds by many times the explosive
equivalent of the total of all bombs and all shells that came from every plane
and every gun in every theater of war in all of the years of World War II.”
Although Operation Candor had been abandoned, Eisenhower managed to bluntly
assess the destructive capability of the U.S. arsenal and at the same time send
the message to the Soviets about American power.

Not a uranium bank

Despite popular support for Atoms for Peace, the proposal languished. The
wary Soviets believed the uranium bank was a propaganda tool. Four months after
the speech, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov delivered a note to
Dulles in Geneva that essentially concluded that because plutonium was a
byproduct of nuclear power, the plan for peaceful uses of nuclear energy would
not reduce the amount of fissile material available for nuclear weapons.

Media hype created considerable political momentum in America for an Atoms
for Peace program. Many people already thought that nuclear power stations were
imminent, and Congress wanted to respond to the euphoria generated by prospects
of the peaceful atom. However, reflecting the views of Lewis Strauss, the
nascent nuclear industry, and general Republican philosophy, neither Congress
nor the White House wanted the government to be the owner of the
commercial-sized reactors that were being contemplated. Accordingly, if
large-scale commercial nuclear applications were to become a reality, the
limited nuclear technology information sharing already going on would have to be
significantly expanded.

To reduce nuclear secrecy, the McMahon Act was amended via the 1954 Atomic
Energy Act. Doing so implemented a different view of Atoms for Peace than
Eisenhower’s speech endorsed. Nuclear materials and data relating to civil
applications could now be transferred to friendly countries directly via
cooperative agreements entered into and approved by the AEC. These agreements
carried with them the right of the United States to verify that the transferred
materials were being used for peaceful purposes. The 1954 act also promoted
domestic commercial nuclear power by allowing utilities to finance, build, and
own nuclear plants and to use fuel provided by the AEC; the act also barred the
government from selling power generated by its research and military reactors.

Eisenhower deserves credit for his call to promote peaceful uses of the atom—his
speech galvanized the public debate over control of nuclear development. But the
Atoms for Peace program as the world has come to know it is not the uranium bank
he proposed. It is instead a collection of agreements on bilateral technical
cooperation and information exchange, backed up by a safeguards system that
ultimately became the domain of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
after its creation by the United Nations in 1957.

Many in the U.S. government and private industry saw Atoms for Peace as the
umbrella under which a U.S.-dominated world nuclear market would be realized.
Under the program, the United States signed cooperative agreements with numerous
countries that resulted in the sales of research reactors and the participation
of foreign nuclear scientists and engineers in U.S.-approved nuclear research
projects. Many nuclear scientists in countries that eventually became of
proliferation concern received training in nuclear technology in the United
States, or with U.S. funding. The first country to sign an agreement was Turkey;
the second was Israel.

Proliferation consequences

Following the passage of the 1954 act, the United States proposed a U.N.
Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. It took place in Geneva in
August 1955, and was the largest scientific meeting ever held, with an estimated
25,000 participants. The atmosphere was euphoric, and much previously secret
information was shared. French scientists revealed the process of plutonium
extraction; the United States declassified significant amounts of data and
technology for the meeting, which was presided over by Homi Bhabha, the “father”
of India’s future nuclear weapons program.

In bilateral discussions before the conference, the Soviets had agreed to
support the creation of an Atomic Energy Agency, and even pledged to contribute
a small amount of fissile material to it. [11] But they had no intention of
digging deeply into their stockpile of fissile material to make the bank
anything other than a symbolic shell. They used the meeting to announce their
cooperation in forming the agency.

The countries interested in the agency met in 1956 in Geneva, and the
organization’s statutes were, after a month of rancorous debate, adopted in
the fall of that year. The IAEA, now officially named, was to have powers of
safeguards and inspection.

One of the main points of contention during the negotiations had to do with
whether the IAEA would have the power to control plutonium stocks by fixing the
amount each country could keep for safeguarded civil uses. The United States
favored this; India and the Soviet Union opposed it. The eventual compromise
basically gave the Indians and the Soviets what they wanted—complete retention
of all the plutonium made in their countries.

Another issue was whether safeguards and inspections would apply to natural
as well as enriched uranium. The United States supported these safeguards; India
didn’t, and India prevailed.

Thus, the world ended up with a system in which each nation is free to have
its own nuclear program and to receive nuclear assistance subject to inspections
and material accounting—precisely the system that the Acheson-Lilienthal
report said would fail to prevent proliferation. Many, if not all, of the
subsequent additions to the nonproliferation regime, including the NPT, the
Nuclear Supplier Agreements, the upgrading of IAEA safeguards, and the passage
of export control legislation, have been needed “fixes.”

There is no doubt that peaceful nuclear technology has produced significant
benefits. But the Faustian bargain spoken of by former Oak Ridge Director Alvin
Weinberg still exists. The spread of nuclear weapons to dangerous and unstable
areas of the world, and possibly to terrorists, is a cost of unfathomable
dimensions. It was only a matter of time before power-hungry or threatened
states—and now non-state actors—would seek to obtain such weapons.

Although this suggests the inevitability of proliferation, it is legitimate
to ask whether Atoms for Peace has accelerated proliferation by helping some
nations achieve more advanced arsenals earlier than would have otherwise been
the case. The jury has been in for some time on this question, and the answer is
yes.

India’s nuclear weapons program, spurred by security concerns over China,
was surely speeded by three factors: the participation of more than a thousand
Indian scientists from 1955–1974 in U.S. nuclear energy research projects; the
sale of U.S. heavy water to India in the 1960s, which was used subsequently in
an unsafeguarded Canadian reactor that produced plutonium for India’s first
nuclear explosion; and U.S. assistance in building and fueling the Tarapur
reactors. [12]

As Homi Sethna, chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission from 1972–1983,
once wrote: “I can say with confidence that the initial cooperation agreement
itself has been the bedrock on which our nuclear program has been built.” [13]

Although Israel received its nuclear weapons production facilities from
France in a conscious act of proliferation, the historical record of the Israeli
program reveals that their chief weapons scientist, David Bergmann, initially
contemplated using the Atoms for Peace program to provide Israel with a reactor
that could be modified to produce plutonium for a weapons research program. [14]
There is no reason to believe that similar plans to misuse Atoms for Peace did
not occur to other countries.

Pakistan’s nuclear program began in the mid-1950s in response to the Atoms
for Peace initiative. One need look no further than the examples of Iran and
Iraq to find members of the NPT who have evidently used their membership to
receive from a number of countries, including the United States, nuclear
technology and materials that are useful in creating a nuclear weapons program
or capability.

The world has paid a price for the early euphoric embrace of Atoms for Peace,
when the spread of nuclear technology was unaccompanied by adequate
consideration of proliferation risks. The subsequent proliferation shocks have
had the salutary effect of producing support for strengthened safeguards and
intrusive inspections, and in creating stronger regimes for controlling the
spread of other weapon-related technologies.

But one lesson from this experience has been learned incompletely—at least
by those who still harbor the notion that the NPT requires nuclear weapon states
to share technology for producing separated fissile material with non-weapon
states. That is that although the pace of the spread of new technology is
affected by policy decisions, by the same token, policy decisions can be driven
by the availability of technology. This is what the Acheson-Lilienthal report
meant when it spoke of states being tempted to consider making nuclear weapons
if they had a national nuclear energy program.

Nowhere is this more starkly illustrated than in a letter written immediately
following the August 1955 Geneva conference by Amos de Shalit, one of Israel’s
top nuclear physicists, to Munya Mardor, then-head of Israel’s research and
planning at the Ministry of Defense. The letter commented negatively on David
Bergmann’s plan to hide Israel’s quest for separated plutonium within a
benign-looking interest in nuclear experimentation using a U.S. reactor that
might be obtained under the Atoms for Peace program. The letter stated:

“We should forget about submitting a plan which does not indicate the real
purposes. Practically all the people with whom we talked were fully aware of the
problem of plutonium, and it is evident that the issue cannot be snuck in
through talk about fissile products, power plants, etc. I do not think that
there is anyone among the responsible individuals in the United States who would
believe that a state which was in possession of a large-scale plutonium
separation capacity, and which would have the objective capabilities of doing
so, would not exploit its knowledge for military purposes or at least conduct
experiments in that direction. For this reason it should be clear that to the
extent that we would be allowed or helped in research involving plutonium
separation, it would mean that we were being actively helped in nuclear weapons
research.” [15]

Ironically, even though Eisenhower’s original uranium bank idea did not
come to fruition, the current nuclear weapons dismantlement programs between the
United States and Russia have the potential to realize his vision by converting
at least some weapons materials into fuel for civilian reactors.

The ultimate extension of Eisenhower’s vision would be a world in which
nuclear energy is used only for peaceful purposes. The world may have to wait a
long time before Atoms for Peace has reached its zenith.

Leonard Weiss has worked on nonproliferation issues for more than 25 years
and wrote major legislation in that area during his tenure as a Senate staff
director (1977–1999). He is now a consultant for the Center for Global
Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). This article
is adapted from a paper prepared for an LLNL conference commemorating the
fiftieth anniversary of the Atoms for Peace speech.

1. James Chace, Acheson: The Secretary of
State Who Created the American World (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1998), p. 127.

2. “A Report on the International Control of
Atomic Energy,” Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., March 16,
1946. Available as Department of State Publication 2498.